Bank bail-outs: Urgent!!! People without Jobs: Yawn.

(10 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Remember when the bank bailouts happened virtually overnight?  

Hank Paulson said, “boo,” and Congress sat bolt upright: Here’s the first trillion!  Here’s the second trillion!  Here’s the third…

Everyday Americans going jobless for years?  Losing homes?  Health insurance? Going hungry?

Nada.  Zilch.  Dick.  Go fuck yourselves, really.  It’s still happening.

Compare and contrast.

For extra  credit, maybe some enterprising soul can determine whether the next six months will decide if Tom Friedman is the reprehensible shit weasel we all think he is.

Welcome to the lean years.

Yes, sir, we’ve just had our 70 fat years in America, thanks to the Greatest Generation and the bounty of freedom and prosperity they built for us. And in these past 70 years, leadership – whether of the country, a university, a company, a state, a charity, or a township – has largely been about giving things away, building things from scratch, lowering taxes or making grants.

But now it feels as if we are entering a new era, “where the great task of government and of leadership is going to be about taking things away from people,” said the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum.

Indeed, to lead now is to trim, to fire or to downsize services, programs or personnel. We’ve gone from the age of government handouts to the age of citizen givebacks, from the age of companions fly free to the age of paying for each bag.

Let’s just hope our lean years will only number seven. That will depend a lot on us and whether we rise to the economic challenges of this moment. Our parents truly were the Greatest Generation. We, alas, in too many ways, have been what the writer Kurt Andersen called “The Grasshopper Generation,” eating through the prosperity that was bequeathed us like hungry locusts.  

Fuck you, Tom Friedman, Uber-fucking-douche.  Your family oversaw the greatest real estate bust in history.  It was people like you that donned your golden “straight-jackets” and drove us all off the cliff.  Golden straight-jacket my eye, you ostentatious crooks.  It was a golden-fleece-the-poor-and-get-out-of-jail-free-card.  Fuck you in the face!   YOU did it!  YOU impoverished us all with your bubbles, and degraded us with wars of aggression.  Not me, asshole.  You had everything to gain from re-inflating the banks and the bubbles.

Isn’t this your homework, Tom?  Didn’t you write this?

Let me be specific: If you didn’t like reading about A.I.G. brokers getting millions in bonuses after their company – 80 percent of which is owned by U.S. taxpayers – racked up the biggest quarterly loss in the history of the Milky Way Galaxy, you’re really not going to like the bank bailout plan to be rolled out soon by the Obama team. That plan will begin by using up the $250 billion or so left in TARP funds to start removing the toxic assets from the banks. But ultimately, to get the scale of bank repair we need, it will likely require some $750 billion more.

The plan makes sense…

Tom Friedman and his ilk are hideous fucking monsters that never stop ravaging humanity with their cruelty, stupidity, and sense of superiority and entitlement.  They never get the fucking message:

… and sometimes it takes a 2-by-4 across the side of the head to get that message.

Is that what it’s going to take, Tom?  You want 1389?  We can do 1389 too.

“Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.”[19]

Maybe you can win another Pulitzer for analyzing the impact of a fist in the face to stimulate your clarity of vision?

After the September 11, 2001, attacks, Friedman’s writing focused more on the threat of terrorism and the Middle East. He was awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary “for his clarity of vision, based on extensive reporting, in commenting on the worldwide impact of the terrorist threat”.

Why you?  Because we could.  We could have hit Brooks.  We could have hit Hiatt.  They’re all part of that bubble.

What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?” You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna to let it grow? Well, Suck. On. This.[23][24][25] ..We could have hit Saudi Arabia. It was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That’s the real truth…

We’re still hitting them, Tom, and we ain’t close to finished.  But the right reason we’re going after you is to de-humiliate and re-dignify ourselves, or something.  Maybe we don’t need no stinking badges.

The right reason for this war, as I argued before it started, was to oust Saddam’s regime and partner with the Iraqi people to try to implement the Arab Human Development report’s prescriptions in the heart of the Arab world. That report said the Arab world is falling off the globe because of a lack of freedom, women’s empowerment, and modern education. The right reason for this war was to partner with Arab moderates in a long-term strategy of dehumiliation and redignification.[26]

You can come along, or you can reap the fucking wind.

If they the Sunnis won’t come around, we should arm the Shiites and Kurds and leave the Sunnis of Iraq to reap the wind.[27]

I’m bringing Tony Soprano, baseball bats, and some really fucking pissed off muppets.

In November 2008, Friedman advised that Barack Obama-in order to deal with Iran-would need “Tony Soprano by your side, not Big Bird” and would require “a Dick Cheney standing over his right shoulder, quietly pounding a baseball bat into his palm.” [30]

And we won’t be quietly pounding the bat in our palms.  No, sir.  Because we can’t afford to keep being this stupid!

We can’t afford to keep being this stupid! We have got to get our groove back. We need a president who will unite us around a common purpose, not a common enemy. Al Qaeda is about 9/11. We are about 9/12, we are about the Fourth of July – which is why I hope that anyone who runs on the 9/11 platform gets trounced.

Fuck you.   You did this, Tom, and much, much more.

Don’t even think about asking us to sacrifice on your behalf.